Google Takes On Siri With New Personal Assistant

by Nate Wooley | April 30, 2013 11:38 am

[1]Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL[2]) products will soon be able to use competitors to Apple’s personal digital assistant Siri.

“Google Now” — a new free digital assistant by Google (NASDAQ:GOOG[3]) available for both iPhone and iPad — was released Monday. It’s the first time the nine-month-old Google Now product has been made available for any system other than Google’s Android.

The release comes less than six months after Google was allowed to compete with Apple’s mapping app. After Apple’s map software famously experienced troubles out of the gate, Google was ready to offer its own software to fill the void.

In its marketing material, Google insists that Google Now is superior to Siri because it learns about user preferences and habits. Examples of this include telling a user the weather when they wake up and reporting on traffic concerns on commonly used roads.

“The more you use Google Now, we will have a better chance of understanding what your needs are and providing you with the right information,” says Baris Gultekin[4], Google Now’s product director.